ATHENA
The ATHENA (Access to cultural heritage networks across Europe) European project is a network of best practices funded by the eContentplus European programme, which builds upon the results of the MINERVA and MICHAEL projects. Like them, it is coordinated by ICCU on behalf of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism. Project partners include over 120 institutions, mostly museums, in 20 EU states and 3 non-European countries.
ATHENA’s goals are:
- supporting and encouraging the participation of museums and other cultural institutions in Europeana;
- producing a set of technical tools, recommendationsand guidelines that museums can use in their own digitisation projects and to facilitate integration of their digital contents in Europeana;
- identifying digital museum content of interest for Europeana as expressions of European culture;
- contributing to the archiving in Europeana repository of the descriptions of objects and documents from different cultural sectors, in collaboration with other projects dealing more directly with the library and archive field;
- developing a software platform that supporting this integration, by facilitating the interoperability of data, including semantic interoperability.
The project was launched in November 2008 and ended in late April 2011.
The main results include experimentation with the LIDO standard, an XML schema that aims to allow the efficient integration of musical documentation from disparate sources. LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) is the first fully international standard for the interoperability of museum descriptions, since it is the result of cooperation between European and American museums; LIDO is the international outgrowth of the German standard Museumdat and is based on the CDWAlite schema, developed by Getty, and CIDOC CRM, an ontology for the cultural heritage sector declared international ISO standard.
The main results include experimentation with the LIDO standard, an XML schema that aims to allow the efficient integration of musical documentation from disparate sources. LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) is the first fully international standard for the interoperability of museum descriptions, since it is the result of cooperation between European and American museums; LIDO is the international outgrowth of the German standard Museumdat and is based on the CDWAlite schema, developed by Getty, and CIDOC CRM, an ontology for the cultural heritage sector declared international ISO standard.
Information on ATHENA is available on the project website: http://www.athenaeurope.org
For more information: ic-cu@beniculturali.it